Broad & Abstract vs. Focused & Narrowed: Common topic trap

Often times when beginning a project, a topic can start pretty broad. For example, a teacher might observe that their children enjoy the Arts, so they may be thinking Art could be a good topic. Or maybe the students enjoy animals, or being outside in Nature. All of these ideas are good starting points, however, they would make very difficult project topics as they are very broad and abstract. These broad and abstract topics can become a trap.

Risks with a topic that is too broad or abstract:

• The topic may not be researched as in-depth, making it more of a unit or theme and not a project.

• It may not be truly focused on what the children want to know, so they may lose interest quickly. Projects are meant to be studied over a longer period of time.

• The topic may not be developmentally appropriate. Young learners use their senses to explore and learn about the world around them. If the topic does not allow for them to discover answers through hands-on exploration, the teacher ends up doing most of the investigating instead of the children.

During Phase I, it’s important not only to look at children’s interests and environment to gather a topic, but to focus and narrow down that topic. So with the Art example, do students enjoy painting, sculpting, taking photos, singing, instruments, dancing? To find out, you can do different focusing experiences: bring in artifacts, read books, sing songs, or do a field site in your building. Through bringing in different paint brushes and clay, the teacher finds most students went straight for the brushes and began painting. So the teacher narrows the topic to paint and brushes.

However, without student questions, there is no direction in what to explore about paint and brushes. A teacher may have an ideas of what types of things the students may enjoy exploring, but without student input the project would be a teacher directed inquiry not a true project. To focus the topic on the children’s interest and create a launching point for in-depth child-led investigations, questions need to be gathered. You can ask students what they want to know, do a web, and/or observe their behaviors to gather their current knowledge and questions. With non-verbal students, observing their actions is crucial for discovering the questions they have or what they want to learn more about. After doing these activities, the teacher finds the following student questions around painting and brushes:

-How do I make paint?

-Do I have to use a brush to paint?

-Why are some brushes small and other brushes big?

-What makes it brown?

-Why does it get wet?

-How long until I can take my painting home?

Now that there is more information about what the students want to know, the topic has narrowed from Art, which is broad and abstract to Paint and brushes. With questions and a focused topic, the teacher and students can head into Phase II, Investigating! Additional artifacts and tools such as measuring tape, rulers, timers, different types of paint and brushes and more can be added to the station for deeper investigation. The teacher can guide students through provoking questions: How do you think we can make brown? What other things can we paint with besides brushes? What happens when we use these other tools?

Just imagine all the new things the students will learn and discover with their focused and narrowed topic!

 Written by Amelia Troutman

Field-Site Visits versus Field Trips, what's the difference?

Often during our discussions on field-sites a lot of confusion regarding the difference between a field trip and a field-site emerges. While they have similar names, their purpose is very different. In Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years, Judy Harris Helm and Lilian G. Katz describe the purpose of field-site visits:

“Field-site visits are specifically designed for the conduct of field work. It is the part of the project that provides children with an opportunity to investigate the field-site and to become engaged in thinking in real depth about the topic. During fieldwork, young investigators attempt to find answers to their own specific questions.”

With the purpose, you can see that one of the key differences is the focus. Field trips are often focused on exploring the new location, while field-sites are focused on finding answers to student questions about a topic.

Another difference is in the planning. Field trips are usually planned by the teacher or location host plans, while field-sites involve children planning what they want to see, ask, and investigate.

The focus and planning, also affect how the experience is recorded through documentation. During field trips, frequently only adults take pictures of students enjoying their time at the location, while during field-sites students take pictures, drawings, and notes, adults may also document areas so that the students can continue to examine them in the classroom.

Some other great comparisons are made in Chapter 3 of Young Investigators, so be sure to check it out.

Some other common questions we receive each year about field-sites:

How many times do we need to visit a field-site?

This depends on your students and their questions. Most teachers have found it is beneficial to have a local site that they can revisit as new questions pop up. Depending how many questions your students have and if they are able to get them all answered will affect how many visits.

What if we can only visit a field-site once?

Document, document, document! Take pictures and videos, as well as have students do drawings and take notes, so that students can use them as a reference as they continue to investigate their topic.

Do all the students need to attend the field-site at the same time?

If your field site is local and you have additional staff and student support, we have had teachers in the past take small groups of students to a field site. This can assist with focus during the visit and space for investigating if the field-site is small. Field-sites can also be assigned as a homework for parents to take their child to a field site to answer certain questions, and to then bring in documentation to share what they found out.

What if my students are not allowed to leave the building?

Depending your topic, you may be able to find a field site within your building. For example, if you are studying how water moves, students can go around the building investigating all the different places there is water and pipes and how they move. Some past projects have even visited boiler rooms. For a mail project, students can investigate the area of the building where you get mail and interview the mail carrier when they arrive instead of having to go to a post office. If you are unable to find a space in your building you can bring in more experts and artifacts to compensate for the inability to do a field site visit.

Looking for more examples on field-sites? Check out this article

Limited in your ability to do field sites? Check out this article with more examples of experts

Written by Amelia Troutman

Projects with Toddlers

Recently, we’ve had a lot of Museum in school experiences with toddlers, and it got me thinking about a question we often receive “Can I do a project with toddlers?” Yes! You can! However, projects for toddlers look slightly different. A huge component of project work is that it is driven by child interest and what they want to know. With older students, they can verbally tell us what they want to know. To find out what toddlers want to know, it’s a lot of observation, observation, observation! 

At Eton school in New Mexico, Yvonne Kogan & Josefina Pin describe this wonderfully in their article Beginning the Journey: The Project Approach with Toddlers

“Our first step was to work at becoming more proficient listeners and better observers of young children to improve our understanding of how these young learners explore their environment and build their knowledge about things that are close to them. We spent long periods of time watching how they interacted with different provocations, how they explored materials, and how they made sense of the world. We became more aware of nonverbal cues, and we attained a better understanding of their interests than we had previously.”

An example of a toddler provocation, might be an action like a toddler holding up a new object to an adult: What is this?

Or it might be a statement like, “Ball no go” when they drop a deflated ball: Why doesn’t this ball roll or bounce?

Using observations such as these and connecting them to a topic that is close to the children’s’ world can lead to a great project. For toddlers, these are topics that focus on their everyday lives and involve a lot of sensory input. So things they interact with every day like food, water, clothes, and objects make for great topics.

Toddler classrooms may have limitations on being able to go to a field sites, but you can have lots of experts come to you or choose a topic that students have access to inside your classroom or building.

Looking for a toddler project example? Check out this past project on boxes!

Written by Amelia Troutman

Authentic Artifacts

As a child, I was interested in hairstyling. I had different dolls with hair I could braid, dye, and even cut! One of the dolls was a salon doll and she came with plastic scissors and hair that could be attached with Velcro. So she could have long knee length hair and then with the pretend scissors it could be “cut” and then a new shoulder length or bob hairstyle could be added on with Velcro.  In real salons they use scissors made of steel that really do cut hair, and hair can’t just be attached in an instant with Velcro. Had I been more familiar with real scissors and how they work, I may have avoided the following incident. My mother turned around and in an instant I had gone from playing with the doll, plastic scissors, and Velcro hair, and instead I had real scissors and my own hair. My locks fell away as a very blunt choppy pixie cut emerged. My mom started screaming, and I didn’t understand until I tried to reattach my hair, the damage I had done. I learned very quickly that real scissors cut hair and hair doesn’t just grow back or get magically reattached. During project work, when students are investigating a topic, it is important that they have access to real artifacts such as tools, living things, and objects. If I had more experiences with real scissors and how once things are cut they can’t just be put back together, I may have avoided all the tears I shed when I realized I had to wear my pixie cut until it grew out.

If students are doing a topic on puppies and just have stuffed animal puppies, they may gain false information. Stuffed animal puppies don’t need food or exercise, so they may not realize that a dog needs to eat or go out. Or they may think that dogs can just eat people food, but certain foods can make dogs very sick. Also, stuffed animal puppies can be put away in a bin or on a shelf when you’re done and they will stay there. Real puppies move and wiggle and run! In order to be able to care for a real puppy, it is important for students to have first-hand experiences with a puppy and the object needed to care for them.

Another example of real artifacts came through a past project in the Early Childhood Connections program. Students were doing a project on firefighters and learned about the weight of firefighters clothes through having clothes as real artifacts. The pretend clothes were light and thin, but when the students felt the weight of the firefighters real clothes they realized how strong firefighters are and how heavy their clothes were. This led students to ask more about the clothes, why were firefighter clothes heavy? Students then began to investigate and learn about how firefighter clothes are fire-resistant and reflective and made of different materials than clothes the students wore.

Children are trying to learn about, understand, and navigate the world around them as they grow and develop into adults. The more real artifacts students have access to the better they can understand how things work. That said, often a question we get is how do I find lots of artifacts?

Artifacts can be any real life objects, tools, living things, or items. For example, in a puppy project in addition to having a puppy visit, real artifacts could be the following:

dog brush

leash

dog bags

dog bed

collar

food bowl

water bowl

dog food

dog harness

dog yard stake

dog house

treats

chew toys

cage

dog boots

dog shampoo

dog toothbrush

dog toothpaste

nail trimmer

cone or e-collar

dog bandages

A topic that is concrete and very hands on will easily lend itself to many artifacts. Experts, colleagues, parents, and other adults can be a great resource when trying to come up with artifacts. Need some help with ideas for artifacts on your topic? Check out more artifact lists in our project examples!

By Amelia Troutman

What, Where, Who, How, When – The Art of Forming Questions

Questions are a key in unlocking information. When meeting someone new we often ask things like their name, where they live, what they do etc. These questions help us to learn things we didn’t know before. As an adult, I’ve learned different kinds of questions and how to propose a question, but we are not born just able to ask questions. Just as any other language skill, questions require practice. So how can we develop this skill in children?

At the Right Question Institute, they’ve been studying and sharing how to do just that: develop the skill of asking questions. Through their Question Formulation Technique (QFT), they walk educators through developing questioning with students. To get started, they place an emphasis on the Question Focus (QFocus):

A stimulus; a springboard you will use to ask questions. The QFocus can be a topic, image, phrase or situation that will serve as the “focus” for generating questions. An effective QFocus should be clear, should provoke and stimulate new lines of thinking and should not be a question.

(The Right Question Institute).

This QFocus lends itself well to project work. In Phase I of the Project Approach, educators narrow down a topic of student interest. One sign of a good topic is that students have a lot of questions about the topic and want to learn more. Sometimes it can be hard to provoke questions in younger students, so until question skills are developed; teachers need to use many observations to find a topic. To help students phrase their thoughts into questions and enhance their question skills, the QFT recommends creating a time for questions with the following rules:

·         Ask as many questions as you can

·         Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any questions 

·         Write down every question exactly as it is stated

·         Change any statement into a question

With our youngest learners, some of the rules may also need to be modeled by a teacher first. For example, a teacher asking a lot of questions around a topic during circle time, or a teacher modeling how to change a statement into a question. So the statement “I like to go to the store with my mom” can evolve into “Do other students like to go to the store with their families? What do they do at the store? Is it the same as me?” During the question production phase, the QRT puts and emphasis on disregarding the quality of the question. From open to close, simple to complex, all are welcome!

After the list has been generated, it is time for improving and prioritizing. Questions can be improved by categorizing them and trying to form them in new ways. Improving questions can help clarify what information you want to gain. Since many questions can be asked during the production phase, prioritizing helps narrow down the focus of questions. This can be especially helpful during phase II of the Project Approach when developing investigations or preparing for an expert visit.

Written by Amelia Troutman

From Personal Project Experience to Project Approach Connections

In middle school, we were tasked with finding a problem, researching it, and writing an editorial to the Chicago Tribune. Having just completed a health program at the end of elementary school, a friend and I were interested in if this program was as effective as it boasted. We surveyed our peers regarding their attitudes towards the health issues and the program. We found that the results it was guaranteeing were not holding true amongst fellow students. Information in hand, we set to work to write up our editorial with our findings, and lo and behold an edited version was published in the Chicago Tribune! As the years have gone by, peer reviewed studies have backed up our initial findings on the ineffectiveness of the program, and I’m always brought back to that initial excitement of picking a topic, researching, and discovering my own answers. While I’m sure our survey was not up to quality research standards, it sparked an interest and empowerment that if I had a question I had the ability to find the answer and do something about it.

Early experiences such as my middle school example, immediately came to mind as I was presented with the opportunity to work with the Kohl Children’s Museum Early Childhood Connections Program. The program focuses on the Project Approach in early childhood classrooms.  This specific approach varies from my personal experience with a structure and techniques to help build investigation skills in early childhood classrooms. Through the program, I have been able to see how project based learning using the Project Approach can occur with students as young as toddlers!

To further expand the reach of the Project Approach and provide a network of people invested in the movement, our education team has built out the Project Approach Connections website and forum. Project Approach Connections is a space to further share and collaborate around project work. Looking for more information on Projects? Check out our project examples page!

Written by Amelia Troutman